Berlin

November 4 & 5, 2024

New York

September 4 & 5, 2024

StaffPlus London video hub

festival of engineering leadership

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

  • How not to lose friends and alienate yourself: Learnings from a journey to Staff Engineer

    How not to lose friends and alienate yourself: Learnings from a journey to Staff Engineer

    Waheed El Miladi reflects on his journey to Staff Engineer and discusses some of the personal pitfalls and unexpected challenges he encountered while moving through roles and the personal skills and strategies I’ve developed to address them.

  • Running large scale migrations continuously

    Running large scale migrations continuously

    Suhail Patel goes over strategies and principles to make large scale migrations less daunting, both from a technical and organisational point of view.

  • Unmasking Imposters by Debugging Doubts

    Unmasking Imposters by debugging doubts

    Bobby D takes inspiration from the popular game “Among Us” to address the challenges engineers face in understanding their value and the importance of developing team awareness to support one another, and shares practical strategies for embracing individual strengths, fostering team collaboration, and building bridges through empathy and inclusivity.

  • Sally Wahba

    Working on software that is older than you

    Sally Wahba shares her views on working on an older codebase. She will share her experience watching the codebase evolve from incorporating acquired startups, to consolidating code branches. She will share pain points that she found to be repeated after joining a younger company.

  • Filling the jar of impact and trust as a Principal Engineer

    Filling the jar of impact and trust as a Principal Engineer

    Nayana Shetty shares some tips and tricks to identify rocks, pebbles and sand you can fill your jar with, ways they enable you to create impact and build trust across the organization and some common challenges you will face when you prioritize your work using this technique and ways to overcome those.

  • Cloud infrastructure architecture for Nubank’s global expansion

    Cloud infrastructure architecture for Nubank’s global expansion

    Lais Oliveira discusses Nubank, one of the world’s largest digital financial services platforms, serving over 70 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Our products and systems weren’t built to be multi-country. Rapid growth and scaling challenges drove rethinking cloud infrastructure and building a technical strategy.

  • Delivering a Digital First BBC - An Architects Perspective

    Delivering a digital first BBC – an architects perspective

    Hannes Ricklefs shares why realising big visions and missions is an exciting yet daunting task. Having worked at the intersection between Product, Delivery, Architecture and Engineering, this talk will explore what is key to continuously evolve the stack, the org, and ways of working.

  • Homebrew’s Great Migration: Moving to GitHub Packages with Zero Downtime

    Homebrew’s great migration: Moving to GitHub packages with zero downtime

    Mike McQuaid discusses the following: the key factors we evaluated to decide between the options available, how compromises were made within and between Homebrew and GitHub (my employer), what techniques we used to implement the migration by the hard deadline with zero downtime, and how to use “soft power” to affect change in your organisation without “hard power” to decide what any individual works on.

  • The journey of a byline

    The journey of a byline

    Alice Bartlett explores the journey our content takes through the many, many applications in our microservices architecture.

  • How to progress as an engineer while doing what you love

    How to progress as an engineer while doing what you love

    Blanca Rojo Martin shares how a large organisation like UBS has created a three-level strategy for Engineers technical career progression.

  • Putting down line management; returning to an individual contributor role

    Putting down line management; returning to an individual contributor role

    Caroline Handley will help you crystallise what options there are. It will clarify what actions can be taken to find out more. Whether you decide to ‘put down line management’ or not, you can make that decision in a more informed way and be more confident in your choices.

  • The dark side of standardization

    The dark side of standardization

    Samantha Schaevitz wants you to leave this talk better equipped to decide whether embarking on a standardization project is right for your stack or organization, and how to do it in a way that avoids common pitfalls along the way.

  • Maximizing your impact when context-switching

    Maximizing your impact when context-switching

    Maude Lemaire spent the last few years trialing a few different ways to sustainably maximize this time by balancing productivity with a bit of mindfulness. Come learn from her (many) mistakes, and hopefully we can all feel a bit less like a Dalí painting.

  • Engineering transparency

    In this talk, I explain why it’s valuable to show our work as Staff engineers. I offer concrete ways to behave transparently and give examples of how each has helped me and my colleagues.

  • Maps to Medicines: One Map to an Atlas

    Maps to medicines: One map to an atlas

    Shweta Bhandare discusses how Recursion scientists perform CRISPR-Cas9 mediated knockout to understand the activity level of every gene in a specific disease model, which allows new discoveries to be made. These maps are specific to a cell-type.

  • Defining a technical vision

    Defining a technical vision

    Eamon Scullion discusses the role of a technical vision in creating a roadmap for your organisation’s technology evolution. We will cover how to assess your current technology architecture, defining your target state and identify next best steps for getting closer to your goal.

  • The dark side of lessons learned

    The dark side of lessons learned

    Dianing Yudono explains how you can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your software development processes by unlocking the power of lessons learned and making them accessible to everyone. Let’s elevate our collective wisdom and drive success together!

  • Defining expectations of Staff Engineers

    Defining expectations of Staff Engineers

    This presentation is mainly targeted for Staff Engineers who work on defining their own roles and responsibilities. Writing a Staff Engineer Guide, and agreeing on the expectations between the engineering and the management, is a great way to learn about your organization.

  • Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once

    Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once

    Michael Tweed will cover a case study of the problem “how do we ensure all our teams are meeting code quality standards”, looking at approaches that are likely to (and have!) failed, vs. those which are much more likely to lead to results and long-lasting buy-in.

  • Setting goals as a staff+ engineer

    Setting goals as a staff+ engineer

    Sabrina Leandro shares how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to you define your backlog of work. You’ll also learn how to track your progress so you can keep growing as an engineering leader in the individual contributor track.

  • Working sideways

    Working sideways

    Aish Raj Dahal touches upon this slightly less talked about aspect of the job as a technical IC leader, which is creating peer relationships and working with other Staff engineers in shaping an organization’s technical roadmap.

  • Scaling your influence through documentation

    Scaling your influence through documentation

    James Ford reflects on his two year journey as a Staff Engineer and how a mix of documentation and working groups has been a surprisingly effective strategy for influencing the opinions of the individual engineers as well as the non-technical stakeholders.

  • Building a shared vision: Creating alignment across autonomous teams

    Building a shared vision: Creating alignment across autonomous teams

    Maria Neumayer’s talk will explore how to overcome these challenges, get buy-in from engineers to promote cross-team collaboration and alignment, all while establishing and refining shared standards and working towards a shared vision.

  • Building a diverse and inclusive guild from the ground up

    Building a diverse and inclusive guild from the ground up

    Liem Pham’s story, a France-born developer with Asian heritage, finding his space in the London tech scene. You will hear about his journey, from being the first frontend engineer at Accurx, to building a diverse and inclusive guild of 20+ members in two years.

  • Librarian's Guide to Documentation

    Librarian’s guide to documentation

    Kaitlyn Tierney wants you to learn how to leverage librarian skills to create and maintain internal documentation that works for you. Improve technical decision making by fostering a culture of documentation excellence and inspiring clear, effective written communication with a few simple practices.